Housing Rhetoric: Argumentation and City Planning

University of Windsor Scholarship at UWindsor OSSA Conference Archive OSSA 2 May 15th, 9:00 AM - May 17th, 5:00 PM Housing Rhetoric: Argumentation and City Planning David Flemming New Mexico State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/ossaarchive Part of the Philosophy Commons Flemming, David, "Housing Rhetoric: Argumentation and City Planning" (1997). OSSA Conference Archive. 34. https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/ossaarchive/OSSA2/papersandcommentaries/34 This Paper is brought to you for free and open access by the Conferences and Conference Proceedings at Scholarship at UWindsor. It has been accepted for inclusion in OSSA Conference Archive by an authorized conference organizer of Scholarship at UWindsor. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE SPACE OF ARGUMENTATION: RHETORIC AND URBAN DESIGN David Fleming Department of English New Mexico State University ©1998, David Fleming Abstract: When architects, designers, and planners map out the physical space of our urban and regional geography, they also map out the discursive space of our everyday lives. This paper is an exploration of the rhetorical norms implicit in contemporary urban design. I examine three theories of the "good city": Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (1977), and Peter Katz's The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community (1994). I close by proposing a set of civic problems shared by designers and rhetoricians. *** "What makes a good city?" may strike some of you as an odd question for a rhetorician to be asking. Historically, however, the art of rhetoric and the self-governing city are closely linked; in some places and during certain periods, to think about one was essentially to think about the other. In such contexts, rhetoric served as the primary instrument of civic life; and the city served as the primary scene of rhetoric. The connection is evident in the story Cicero tells at the beginning of De Inventione. Long ago, he writes, men were dispersed, wandering at large in the fields and forests, and relying chiefly on physical strength to survive. Through one man's reason and eloquence ("rationem atque orationem") they were induced to assemble together, where they were subsequently transformed into a "kind and gentle folk" (I.ii.2). Speech continued to play a vital role in communal life, Cicero writes, even after this foundational act: [A]fter cities had been established how could it have been brought to pass that men should learn to keep faith and observe justice and become accustomed to obey others voluntarily and believe not only that they must work for the common good but even sacrifice life itself, unless men had been able by eloquence to persuade their fellows of the truth of what they had discovered by reason? (I.ii.3) Rhetoric thus accounts for the origins of the city; and the city accounts for the origins of rhetoric. And, just as virtue cannot be voiceless (if it is to be effective), speech cannot be politically unanchored (if it is to be useful)— for Cicero, rhetoric is worthy precisely because it is subordinated to "civil" affairs (I.v.6). Similar myths describing a mutual relationship between rhetoric and the city are common in the classical era. Carolyn Miller (1993) has compared various Greek versions of the myth, showing how Plato and Aristotle tried to weaken the logos/polis bond first articulated by Protagoras and later re-affirmed by Isocrates and Cicero. "Protagoras' teaching," Miller writes "makes rhetoric and politics inseparable dimensions of each other: the democratic city requires rhetoric for its self-constituting operation, and rhetoric must take place within and concern the affairs of the city" (p. 223). There may be some historical truth to the mythical connection between rhetoric and the city. According to Jean- Pierre Vernant (1982), writing (re-introduced into Greece in the 9th C., BCE) made social and political decisions more widely accessible, allowing for the transference of political sovereignty from the monarch to a social space, the agora, where problems of general interest could be debated and resolved. And once you have the agora, Vernant writes, you have the polis, because the polis implies first of all the preeminence of speech (specifically, the antithetical demonstrations of public oratory) over all other instruments of power. What emerges is a reciprocal relationship between politics and logos: "The art of politics became essentially the management of language; and logos from the beginning took on an awareness of itself, of its rules and its effectiveness, through its political function" (p. 50). Eugene Garver (1994) has made a similar point about Aristotle's rhetorical theory; it is, he claims, "embedded in the particular circumstances of the polis," a context which for Aristotle was "natural" but for us is "unnatural" (p. 55). Because we no longer live in the kind of city Aristotle lived in, we have transformed rhetoric into a portable techne, usable in all sorts of non-political contexts. For Aristotle, rhetoric was a restricted, civic art rather than a universal, professional one. It was the art of the citizen; and a citizen, for Aristotle, was someone unwilling to delegate the practice of rhetoric (p. 48). (On the relation claimed for eloquence and civic virtue in the Athens of the 5th and 4th C., BCE, see also Yunis, 1996; Murray, 1990; De Romilly, 1992; and Schiappa, 1991.) The Italian Renaissance offered another sphere for this reciprocal relationship to be played out, especially in the independent republics of the Northern communes. Petrarch, for example, was aware of the virtues of the contemplative life but was also strongly attracted to rhetoric. He knew instinctively that to be a rhetor was to be committed to the practical affairs of one's city; and to be active in one's city was to be, almost by definition, a rhetor. "It is a peculiar characteristic of orators," he wrote, "that they take pleasure in large cities and in the press of the crowd, in proportion to the greatness of their own talents. They curse solitude, and hate and oppose silence where decisions are to be made" (qtd. in Seigel, 1968, p. 43). Vico also attempted to revive the Ciceronian equation of rhetoric and civic virtue. He believed, according to Michael Mooney (1985), that none of nature's gifts was more critical for the orator than a civil education: "simply growing up as part of a city's life, coming to know its streets and its buildings, learning its language and its lore, its history and its ways, and in time being trained in its schools, especially in the company of one's peers. There is nothing, he concluded, that can instruct one better in that sensus communis, which is the norm of all prudence and eloquence" (p. 84). Cartesian analysis, Vico thought, made students incapable of managing civic affairs; what they needed was the fullness and pliability of rhetoric. Why does this coupling of rhetoric and the city seem so strange to modern sensibilities? Is it because the nation has become the central site for political discourse in our time? Because modern transportation and communication technologies seem to have made shared space irrelevant for social interaction? Because the public realm has become increasingly private? Because our urban centers have experienced such deterioration? According to Hannah Arendt (1958), the history of the West since the disappearance of the city-state is the story of the gradual abasement of the vita activa: "a way of life in which speech and only speech made sense and where the central concern of all citizens was to talk with each other" (p. 27). Thomas Bender (1984) depicts a crucial moment in this story, the time at the end of the 19th C. when the close connection between civic and scholarly culture in American higher education was broken. In the 18th C., Bender writes, learned associations typically included lay intellectuals as well as professional ones; but by the 1880s, academic scholarship had oriented itself towards national rather than civic associations. The result, Bender argues, was that the emergent professionals severed intellectual life from place, leaving Americans with an impoverished public culture. Michael Halloran (1982) tells a similar tale about the rise and fall of rhetoric in American colleges. In the late 18th C., he argues, rhetoric was the central subject in the post-secondary curriculum; emphasis was given to the role of the English language in the world of practical affairs; oral communication (especially forensic disputation and political declamation) was privileged; and the ability to speak to diverse audiences, including local dignitaries, was a prominent goal. One hundred years later, rhetoric had been demoted to a minor place in curriculum, diminished by the concept of belles lettres, i.e., a concern for written, aesthetic language over oral, public discourse; the increasing specialization of the curriculum, in which general and public concerns dropped out of sight; and the changing role of education itself, which came to be seen not as the preparation of leaders for the community but the means by which individuals could advance in society. The time may be ripe for a re-coupling of the logos/polis pair. The rhetoric revival of the past half century has reminded us that language is very much a communal affair; this has led, in turn, to a renewed concern for local knowledge and situated practice. In political philosophy, meanwhile, there has been a similar reawakening to community, to the role of local participation and deliberation in public life. Perhaps rhetoricians are searching for an ethical anchor that can only be provided by politics. And political philosophers, in turning to the local, participatory, and moral, have found in rhetoric their own lost appreciation for situated language.

Load more